Heaven is a fairy tale, says British physicist Stephen Hawking
Heaven is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark, the eminent British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking said in an interview published on Monday. Hawking, 69, was expected to die within a few years of being diagnosed with degenerative motor neurone disease at the age of 21, but became one of the world’s most famous scientists with the publication of his 1988 book “A Brief History of Time”.
“I have lived with the prospect of an early death for the last 49 years. I’m not afraid of death, but I’m in no hurry to die. I have so much I want to do first,” he told the Guardian newspaper. “I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.”
Hawking gave the interview ahead of the Google Zeitgeist meeting in London where he will join speakers including British finance minister George Osborne and Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz. Addressing the question “Why are we here?” he will argue tiny quantum fluctuations in the very early universe sowed the seeds of human life.
His 2010 book “The Grand Design” provoked a backlash among religious leaders, including chief rabbi Lord Sacks, for arguing there was no need for a divine force to explain the creation of the universe.
Read the full story by Nia Williams here. A link to the interview is here.
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God did not create the universe, gravity did, says Stephen Hawking
God did not create the universe and the “Big Bang” was an inevitable consequence of the laws of physics, the eminent British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking argues in a new book.
In “The Grand Design,” co-authored with U.S. physicist Leonard Mlodinow, Hawking says a new series of theories made a creator of the universe redundant, according to the Times newspaper which published extracts on Thursday.
“Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist,” Hawking writes. “It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.”
Hawking, 68, who won global recognition with his 1988 book “A Brief History of Time,” an account of the origins of the universe, is renowned for his work on black holes, cosmology and quantum gravity. His latest comments suggest he has broken away from previous views he has expressed on religion. Previously, he wrote that the laws of physics meant it was simply not necessary to believe that God had intervened in the Big Bang.
For an initial sceptical reaction, see Mark Vernon’s Philosophy and Life blog.
Okay, I am not a scientists, and I am a dumb when it comes to mathematics, but very soon, we’ll see true facts behind every false theories from our scientists ( Science is not the problem, the problem is “some” of our feeble scientists who wanted to be renowned by force, thus creating problems to make science a problem). They are using calculation to define issues of observation; they are proving to you things they themselves haven’t seen with their own eyes; they designed cameras and computers to make their theories work in line; they thoughts ” we can remove the hand of the Creator by denying Him in our theories, so people could believe they existed for nothing”. They said things drop to the centre of the earth because a force attract them, and whatever does go up must come down. Well, I have seen things which goes up but never come down- How about that? Why isn’t gravity attracting it? Can we breathe in the air in the space? Is there atmosphere there atall? Not really! The theory of gravity is hoax; there is no gravity! Though it may be in the space, but never ever on this very planet I live.
Was this not the same Hawking who said God created the Sun? Few months later, he denied God didn’t! Now he is telling you gravity formed you from nothing, to make you feel nothing from nothing, so you can live for nothing and die for nothing! Guys, wake up! If you need to understand any mysteries behind human existence, please read the Bible, and simply ask for wisdom, knowledge and understanding. I did just this and I have been inspired things that can be done to effectively stop the “giant pilar that riad our lands”. All I know, and that I’ll adhere to is that there is a Creator whose hands are full of wonders and mind with creative thoughts; He created the stars and the sun, he created the moon, too. HE CREATED YOU- All these I knew before reading the Bible atall. And if you don’t want to bring in religion in this sense, simply put away religion theories and explanation of Life, and embark on serious NATURE EXPLORATION, and you’ll see a creative mind in the centre of everything in LIFE.
There is a loving, intelligent, sweet, faithful and mighty creator who created every discovered and undiscovered species we have seen and yet to see and that we’ll never see; His name is Jehovaah, the almighty, the all-powerful, the all-controller!
Thank you,
Emmanuel.
Scientists inch towards finding elusive “God particle” creating cosmos
Scientists working with particle accelerators in Europe and the United States said on Monday they may be closing in on the elusive Higgs Boson, the “God particle” believed crucial to forming the cosmos after the Big Bang.
Researchers from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) project near Geneva said in just three months of experiments they had already detected all the particles at the heart of our current understanding of physics, the Standard Model.
The International Conference on High Energy Physics in Paris heard that experiments were progressing faster than expected and entering a stage in which “new physics” would emerge. This could include long-awaited proof of the existence of the Higgs Boson and the detection of dark matter, believed to make up about a quarter of the universe alongside an observable 5 percent and 70 percent consisting of invisible dark energy.
Physicists think this subatomic speck of matter, if it is ever found, could explain the mysterious code at the origin of the physical world. To know this would be to “know the mind of God,” as Einstein wanted to do. The physicist who launched the hunt for this elusive particle doesn’t like its nickname. “It embarrasses me,” Peter Higgs has said. “Although I am not a believer myself, it’s a misuse of terminology that might offend some people.”
“Although I am not a believer myself, it’s a misuse of terminology that might offend some people.”A-OK! Great quote!
Did God stop CERN from discovering the “God particle”?
The great quantum physicist Niels Bohr once said a colleague’s new theory was crazy, but perhaps not crazy enough to be correct. Two scientists seem to have taken that approach to heart when they speculated that God may have shut down the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva to keep it from discovering the elusive “God particle.”
According to an essay in the New York Times, the scientists are trying to explain why the collider, the world’s largest particle accelerator turned on with great fanfare in September 2008 by the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), was closed down for major repairs just over a week later. The 3 billion-euro collider was supposed to track down the Higgs boson, a subatomic particle believed to have given mass to the universe milliseconds after the Big Bang created it some 15 billion years ago.
Physicists think this minuscule speck of matter, if ever found, could explain the mysterious code at the origin of the physical world. To know this would be to “know the mind of God”, as Einstein put it. The Nobel Prize winning physicist Leon Lederman dubbed the Higgs boson the “God particle” in a book of the same name 15 years ago.
Now, Holger Bech Nielsen of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen has reached back to the God symbolism to explain what went wrong at CERN. He and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto have suggested, as Times science writer Dennis Overbye put it, that “the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveller who goes back in time to kill his grandfather”.
This is heavy stuff, and it gets heavier.
“It must be our prediction that all Higgs producing machines shall have bad luck,” Dr. Nielsen said in an e-mail to Overbye. In an unpublished essay, Overbye relates, Dr. Nielson said of the theory, “Well, one could even almost say that we have a model for God.” It is their guess, he went on, “that He rather hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them.”
We usually report about scientists who say there is no God and ridicule those who believe in Him (like the biologist and “neo-atheist” Richard Dawkins). But at the cutting edge of physics, some kind of faith seems to reappear (as in the case of Templeton Prize winner Bernard d’Espagnat). Isn’t it strange that these scientists turn so often to a “God option” to explain what they’re investigating?
What is God Particle? According my fresh thought:
1. It is a naked singularity of mass or the smallest black hole in the Universe;
2. It has huge naked mass, gravitation and inertia;
3. It is not a material particle;
4. It is not in the Standard Model of elementary particles;
5. It is an Ultimate Particle, cannot be decay;
6. Its Mass cannot be converted into energy;
7. The lowest limit of its mass is about 10.9?g, and the upper limit is about 0.67*10^6kg, that means that its mass may be exceeded one kilogram!
8. Estimated mass of Higgs Particle is about 16 orders of magnitude smaller than lower limit of Mass of God Particle at least. So the mass of God Particle is substantially undervalued by mainstream physics
9. So Higgs particle is not God particle;
10. And so I believe that to find the God particle with LHC is an impossible mission, LHC efforts will be ended in failure, and it is destined. I think that to find God Particle with colliders (such as LHC) is an extremely extravagant wrong way.
How to find God Particle?
Based on my bran-new thread, I design several kinds of very simple and very cheap physical experimental methods to find the God particle, to make a small black hole and to create new unknown stable material particles without using any accelerator or collider such as LHC.
Maybe to find God Particle is not a hard mission for me?
Revolution in Physics will soon arrival, believe me.
The scientist who leaves room for spirituality
The German philosopher Immanuel Kant once wrote that he “had to deny knowledge to make room for faith.” The French physicist Bernard d’Espagnat hasn’t denied knowledge in his long career developing the philosophy that won him this year’s $1.42 million Templeton Prize. He was pursuing knowledge to better understand what we can know about the ultimate reality of the world. But just like his philosophy echoes that of Kant’s with its conviction that there are limits on knowing reality, his work leaves some room — he would say for spirituality — by saying that human intuitions like art, music and spirituality can help us go further when science searching to understand the world reaches the end of its tether.
D’Espagnat’s prize was announced at UNESCO in Paris on Monday. The quantum physics at the core of his work presents baffling insights about reality, but his philosophical conclusions from them sound like common sense. Science is an amazing discipline that opens vast areas of knowledge but cannot go all the way to explaining ultimate reality. There’s a mystery at the core of our existence that we can get a little closer to through the untestable but undeniable intuitions we have. That “little closer” still leaves a large black hole in our knowledge, but it is more than we have if we only rely on empirical science.
As often happens in cases like this, d’Espagnat was available for embargoed interviews several days before the prize was announced. I had the pleasure of meeting him on Friday at the Lutetia, a five-star hotel only a short bike ride from my more modest digs in Paris. Now 87 years old, d’Espagnat can look back on a long and illustrious career as a senior physicist at the CERN laboratory in Geneva, professor at the University of Paris (at its science hub in the suburb of Orsay) and guest lecturer at universities and conferences abroad. His latest book in English, On Physics and Philosophy, came out in the United States in 2006.
At the end, I asked what he would do with his prize money. After paying the taxes on it, he stressed as he started his answer, he would divide it into three equal parts. One would go to promote the study of “negative theology,” a theology that he says fits his spiritualist outlook and conviction that we can only describe God by concepts that say what God is not. The second part would go to associations helping the homeless. And the last third he and his wife would use to make their home more senior-friendly. “My wife is handicapped and she would very much like to remain at home as long as possible,” he said.
You can read our story here or consult the prize website for more information and an extensive collection of links about his work. Some excerpts from my interview with d’Espagnat are on the next page. Taking a page from Paul Krugman’s economics blog, let me put a health warning on it right away — (wonkish).
At points in the history of the western world, science has been viewed as an opposition to the religious establishment, and people with new ideas censored. An example being Galileo, who was put under house arrest for reasserting previous claims that the earth went around the sun.
Another German scientist, Nietzsche also commented upon similar affects upon thought and the scientific community in “Beyond good and Evil”.
Science is observation, and being able to make accurate predictions based upon what is learned. A healthy curiosity and desire to learn exists no matter what a person believes, but in that frame of reference beliefs would evolve and change with time as more is learned.
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